To Obama

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  “Yeah,” he said, and he looked up at me, into my eyes, as if he were coming up for air.

  “I don’t want to suggest that I would have necessarily described it in a sort of a straight line from when I started running,” he said. “But I do think that that was pretty embedded in our campaign philosophy. I think that’s how we won Iowa, was having a bunch of young kids form those relationships because they were listening to people. It wasn’t us selling a policy manifesto, and it wasn’t even because we were selling me. It was because some young person in a town they’ve never been to went around and talked to people, and listened to them, and saw them. And created the kinds of bonds that made people want to then try to work together.”

  I could tell he was talking about Fiona and all the people like her who knocked on doors. I looked over. She had her eyebrows up. I wanted to say, “So how does that make you feel?” I don’t know how it was that we got tiptoeing toward therapy.

  I referred back to the picture of Marnie on the table. She was wearing a black suit, and her hands were folded neatly on a desk covered in piles of paperwork, Post-it notes, files—a place of work not unlike Obama’s desk on the other side of the room. Next to the photo was a copy of Obama’s response to her. “I’m rooting for you.”

  “When I think about somebody like Marnie in particular,” he said, “it was important, because based on what she had written, I felt fairly confident that this would be a temporary rather than permanent circumstance.”

  As he continued talking about his correspondence with Marnie, I came to realize that what he zeroed in on was not “I’m rooting for you”—which to me, and to Marnie, and to Meredith, and to a live studio audience and all the folks back home was the important part. No, what Obama was focused on was the blah-blah-blah part, the what-a-president-should-say part in his response to Marnie.

  I know that things seem discouraging now, but demand for educators and persons with your skills will grow as the economy and state budgets rebound.

  “Part of what happened during the early parts of this Great Recession,” Obama said, “was state and local governments were seeing their budgets hemorrhage. And a big part of the Recovery Act was getting money to states and school districts so that they would not lay off massive numbers of teachers, firefighters, and cops. And given what Marnie was describing, I felt as if, if she could stay at it, that, like in school districts across the country, there’d be the opportunity for her to be rehired at some point.”

  The Recovery Act. That note about rooting for Marnie was about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? In his mind apparently it was. It wasn’t just “I hear you,” or “I feel your pain,” or even “I’m rooting for you.” It was, “Hang in there; I’ve got this.”

  “It’s the power of empathy not as an end-all, be-all,” he said. “Because even after you’ve listened to somebody or seen them, they still have a concrete problem. They’ve lost their house. They’ve lost their job. They disagree with you on abortion. They think that you’re pulling troops out of Afghanistan too soon and, you know, potentially betraying the sacrifices that have been made by the fallen. There are all these concrete issues that are real. And there are real conflicts and real choices.

  “But what this form of story sharing and empathy and listening does is it creates the conditions around which we can then have a meaningful conversation and sort through our differences and our challenges,” he said, “and arrive at better decisions because we’ve been able to hear everybody. Everybody feels heard so that even if a decision’s made that they don’t completely agree with, then at least they feel like, Okay, I was part of this. This wasn’t just dumped on me.”

  “Well, now you sound just like Neil,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  He had no idea who Neil was, of course. Neil’s mom, Vicki Shearer, had not used his name in her letter to the president.

  I pulled out Vicki’s letter. Here was a family trying to keep it together after the 2016 election when one of them, the father, had voted for Trump against the perceived interests of the rest of the family. I had a photo of the group gathered around the couch in their living room. “Here’s Neil,” I said, pointing. I told Obama that the whole Shearer family were supporters of his to the core. “In fact, when you won in 2008, Vicki baked an Obama pie.”

  I had a picture of the pie too.

  “Oh, that’s a good pie,” Obama said, reaching for the picture. “That’s excellent. Thanks for the ears there—”

  “Yeah, Vicki thought Michelle would appreciate the ears.”

  “She got it just right.”

  I read him some of the things Neil had said about the transformative power of listening.

  For people who are so disappointed or confused by family members’ votes, or the way they’re talking about politics right now, I think we all have to listen to each other and admit when we don’t understand. I think everyone wants to be heard right now. I even think Trump wants that. I think he just wants someone to say, “You are the president!” To acknowledge that he did that. As a human to a human, I can have compassion for needing to be heard.

  “Exactly,” Obama said. (He offered no comment on the part about Trump needing validation.) “Which is why I wanted to offer that corrective to the idea that, you know, empathy—putting yourself in somebody’s shoes—somehow solves all the divisions and conflicts we have in the country. That’s wishful thinking. But what is true is that if a person is recognized, and how they’re feeling is validated as being true for them, then they are more prone to engage. And open up to the possibilities of other people’s perspectives and maybe even at some point say, ‘Hmm. I didn’t think of that. Maybe I’m going to rethink how I think about certain things.’

  “I will tell you—and Fiona will recall this—some of my favorite letters were actually to people who violently disagreed with me. So, okay, you want to call me an idiot. Well, I want you to know there’s a person at the other end of this thing who’s listening to you, and here’s why, actually, I did what I did. And I can see why you’re thinking this way, but here are some countervailing facts for you to consider.

  “Those letters I always hoped got into circulation. Right? That there were entire communities or families or schools where people looked at that and they said, ‘Huh. I still disagree with the guy, but the fact that he bothered to write back—that’s interesting to me.’ And maybe then it starts breaking open some new possibilities. Maybe not immediately. Maybe it’s in the future. Maybe it’s a kid notices that, and they say, ‘Huh, there’s actually this human who’s in the White House. And if you have something to say, he’s supposed to listen to you.’ ”

  “I think that worked often,” Fiona chimed in. “And sometimes it got back to you, and you personally got a follow-up where, after you sent a handwritten letter to someone who disagreed with you, they wrote back either saying, ‘I still disagree and here’s why’ or ‘You know what? I’d like to rescind my earlier statement.’ And in other cases where it didn’t make its way back to you, we got word in our office that, you know, a letter had been put up in a faculty lounge or sort of small conversations started out of something that began with a pretty angry late-night email.”

  “It goes both ways, right?” Obama said. “I want to emphasize the degree to which this was important and useful to me doing my job.

  “There was a sizeable percentage of the letters where, if they were critical, I’d read them and say, ‘Well, that’s not fair. I don’t think that’s true. They obviously don’t know this.’ But there were times where somebody would write a letter, and I’d say, ‘I can see their point.’ And I’d circle it, and I’d write it on the margins: ‘Is this true?’ or ‘Can you explain why this is?’ or ‘Why don’t we fix this?’ ”

  * * *

  —

  We talked about two other letters that day, and bot
h pointed him in that same direction—the degree to which the letters helped him do his job. The emphasis surprised me, although I suppose it shouldn’t have. I remembered that he had brought it up the last time we had talked, when he was still in the White House. We’d been discussing some of the mail he got in the wake of the 2016 election. “There was a lot of anxiety and sadness I had to respond to,” he said that day. “I remember one that said, ‘Pack up your bags because, thank goodness, we’re about to undo everything you’ve done; it couldn’t have come a moment too soon,’ something along those lines. I don’t think I responded to that one….”

  I remember that I had asked him then how he might advise President-Elect Donald Trump on what to do with the mail.

  He had laughed. I think it was more out of awkwardness than because of any sort of image the question may have conjured, but I can’t say for sure.

  “But, um, it, ah,” he said about the idea of President-Elect Trump reading the mail. “You know what, this is a great habit. I think it worked for me because it wasn’t something I did for anyone else. I did it because, as you said, it sustained me. So maybe it will sustain others in the future. Okay?”

  Okay. But I never used the word “sustained.” I remember wondering how that word had popped up.

  “I can tick off the bills and the policies and the accomplishments,” he said. “But I tell you one of the things I’m proud of about having been in this office is that I don’t feel like I’ve…lost myself.”

  Like everything else, that thought came out slowly. But I suppose not losing yourself is a big thing to think about quickly.

  “I feel as if—even if my skin is thicker from, you know, public criticism, and I’m wiser about the workings of government, I haven’t become…cynical, and I haven’t become calloused, and I would like to think that these letters have something to do with that,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The letters as sustenance was the same idea he came around to when we talked about the letter from Donna Coltharp. “She’s the attorney who wrote to thank you for commuting her client’s two life sentences,” I said, handing him a picture.

  “Is this Billy here?” he asked.

  “That’s Billy!” I said. “And there’s Donna. They had never met in person before this. They had this really wonderful Oprah moment.”

  “Is that right?” he said, looking deeper into the photo, smiling wide. “How cool is that?”

  I told him Billy was doing great. He got a job as a roofer. He got promoted to supervisor. He got a girlfriend. Obama’s action had given Billy a second chance at life, and he was determined to make the most of it.

  “That’s wonderful,” Obama said. “That means a lot.”

  I told him the reason Donna had told me she wrote. She’d wanted to acknowledge that there was a human being behind all those last-minute sentence commutations; forgiveness was, after all, a personal act. “She wanted to thank you.”

  “That means a lot,” he said. “I will say, selfishly, that the number of people who would write letters acknowledging the meaningful difference that a policy had made in their lives—making it real as opposed to abstract—was sustaining.

  “The numbers are telling you twenty million people got healthcare through the ACA,” he said. “But that’s not the same as a mom writing a letter saying, ‘My son got insurance. He got his first physical in a decade. They caught a tumor. It’s out. He’s fine.’ And you go, Okay, that is the work we’re doing.

  “And the same is true in this circumstance. You read not only that Billy had contacted Donna to say thank you to her but that he’s rebuilding his life.”

  “When you wrote back to Donna, you thanked her for her service,” I said. “That was what meant so much to her. She’s like, ‘No one ever thanks us.’ ”

  “Well, she was deserving,” he said. “It was a little lovefest.”

  “A thank-you loop.”

  “A loop!”

  He could see another photo popping out of my file folder. He tilted his head up as if to peek.

  “That’s Marg,” I said, handing the photo to him.

  “Marjorie? Look at Marg! Marg is pretty cute. I love the pictures behind Marg too. And the little dolls—”

  “She was writing to tell you that she was listening to you.”

  “It’s a beautiful letter.”

  She was writing about trying to expel the racism she believed was lodged like some kind of poison in her heart. She had discovered it and wanted to get rid of it.

  “And now here’s Marg starting a chapter of the NAACP in her town,” I said.

  “What a great story.”

  “She went for it. She wanted to tell you that.”

  “It makes me proud,” he said. “My grandmother, who loved me more than anyone, had an initial reaction like Marg to young black men approaching.”

  He sat for a moment before finishing his thought, his gaze going back to the spot in front of him occupied by his shoes. He had told the story about his grandmother publicly back in the earliest days of the presidential campaign, in a speech during the 2008 primary against Hillary Clinton. Afterward, he had been criticized for his candor about a topic as sensitive as unconscious bias. In a radio interview later, he tried to explain what he had meant, which made it only more controversial. “The point I was making,” he said to the host, “was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

  “Typical white person.” You’re not supposed to say stuff like that, especially not as the first black candidate ever to run for the office. The Clinton campaign pounced. Obama was clearly new at this game.

  As he sat in silence and thought that day with me and Fiona, the room felt static, like we weren’t supposed to move. Behind him was a large window with wooden shades blocking some of the light. Behind that the March winds were whooshing; you could hear them. I thought about how people talk about a person having the wind at his back, and they talk about having it in front, fighting it. But here was a man with neither. Here was a person set apart from a current violently streaming by. The world out there in tumult. The calmness in here.

  All that listening he’d been talking about—eight years of it—was just history. All those letters he’d received during his presidency, millions of them, had been shipped off to the National Archives. I was glad that he, or someone in his administration, had thought to save them. They’ll live on, artifacts for a museum exhibit someday. Here are the voices of America, from 2009 to 2017. This is us during the Obama years, surviving an economic crisis, a healthcare overhaul, a couple of wars, mass shootings, a government shutdown, heartache at our borders, hurricanes, the ravages of climate change, and all the rest of it. This is who we were, and there is an innocence about it, as there is always an innocence when you look back at yourself. Get too close, and it hurts, depending on your point of comparison.

  Wallowing in the sorrow of what’s lost is always a temptation.

  But the letters offer more. They reignite the imagination. They remind you that kindness matters (seriously, we can all use a palate cleanser on that one alone), whether it’s in style or, as it may appear to be under the Trump administration, it’s out. They remind you that government can work and that people committed to public service really do exist. Moreover, there is the deepening discovery of what used to be. All that was right under your nose that maybe you hadn’t noticed. I’d had no idea, not until the last few months of Obama’s presidency, that a place like the mailroom even existed. I had never known that all those quiet conversations between the president and his constituents were going
on, that there were all those random people believing they had the president’s ear or believing that they could have it by simply jotting him a note. I’d had no idea that there was an entire army of caretakers reporting to duty each day to make sure the conversation kept going.

  A discovery like that can give you hope. We had this, which means we can have it again. “And, you know, right now,” Obama said to me, finally looking up from his shoe trance and meeting my eyes, “a lot of people who have worked with me in the past or supported me or voted for me, you know, can get discouraged by the news day to day. And that’s understandable. I always have to be careful in not sounding as if I am Pollyannaish about the future.”

  The future. I hadn’t said the word out loud. But it was, of course, the elephant in the room. America was not, as of late, aging gracefully. Did he feel responsible? Did he want to get back to it?

  “A better future is earned,” he said. “It’s hard work. And democracy in a country this big, with such a diverse population, is especially hard. And complicated. And there are times in our history where we’ve had bad, ugly stretches. And so it’s important not to ever forget and to recognize that the ideals and the best version of America isn’t preordained.

  “But I do think that when you hear someone like Marjorie, at her age, just take a leap of faith like that, then you can’t help but feel as if it is worth the effort.

  “If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That’s not the job of the president. That’s not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It’s the job of citizens.”

  * * *

  —

  Over to you, citizens.

  * * *

  —

  “You didn’t cry,” I said to Fiona afterward.